


Grounding

by businessghost



Category: Original Work
Genre: Freeform, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, also a brief reference to (legal) drugs, sorry - Freeform, vaugely implied, yet another personal piece
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-08-11 07:52:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7882912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/businessghost/pseuds/businessghost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the world's angstiest and most unneccesarily complex thank-you card.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Cold. The first thing I noticed about the bracelet was its temperature. A shock of cool stone against my inflamed skin as I stretch-slide-slipped it past my knuckles. The beads rested against the cuts that hovered tentatively over my veins. They were a mistake. Not synonymous with “accident”. The sense of timing was perfect, ironic, touching. I needed something frigid, something grounding; something to obfuscate my show of weakness.

                It was the cold or the sentimentality that brought tears to my eyes. I used to run hot. My sister would cling to me; she was always the reflective moon to my sun. Now my hands are always cold. That would be my fault, of course. Mine and my moon’s. The only heat to be had from me anymore has to be coaxed to the surface by unconventional means. And somehow, the one time it was necessary, that angry heat would be soothed by a chance gift.

                Weight. The first time I gave my mother the bracelet to hold it was the initial comment that spilled unbidden from her lips. It was heavy.

“What is it made of, again?”

“Hematite.”

                The second time she held it, she studied it for longer. Brow furrowed, she squinted down at the earthy beads. She passed each one through her fingers with careful practiced precision. I could see her catholic upbringing in those motions as she fingered each bead and rolled it smoothly through her hands. Her prayers didn’t fit with its origins. It didn’t matter. I fit with neither. She smiled as she handed it back to me, a peculiar expression that didn’t mesh with her usual behavior. It always seemed to be directed at me. Her eyes looked unbelievably sad, her smile struggled to exist, to the point that she could only manage a closed-lip grimace. I suspected, this time only, that her reaction was for you. Her habitual prayers; I hoped they were for you too, if only so that I didn’t have to feel the guilt of them being for me.

                Love. That’s what my best friend noticed, when I told her the bracelet’s history. It is entwined with your history. She said, “This boy is in love with you”. I said you weren’t. Because you aren’t. But what exists here? Love anyway. I love you, am in love with all the best parts of you, want to know and understand and love all the rest. It isn’t romantic. It isn’t the way that everyone suspects. Sometimes I am so full of love it feels like my chest will explode. If anyone was ever in the fallout radius for it, it’s you. Uncertainty surrounds this feeling. With everything, with everyone. I wear certainty on my wrist. I can feel it pulling me gently towards Earth.

                What is the first thing that struck you, when it was yours? Did you feel its history, substantial in your palm? Did you run your fingers across the even surface, hear the gentle snap of stone on stone as it settled on your wrist? When you wrapped it up and gave it away were you unaware of all these things? Did you forget how beautiful and intentional it was?

What if, instead, my biased perception gave it all these traits? The things I needed most became its primary characteristics, I willed them into existence. You knew it as an entirely different beast; whatever it needed to be for you, so it was. And you never noticed its weight or temperature or how the beads look like a rosary from behind these eyes. It was yours, it is mine; it belonged to another story before us. It has a past that stretches beyond fluoxetine headaches and the state of Arizona and the events of 2014, B.C.E. Thank you, for your gift and all that it is.


	2. Appendix A

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just one little correction to be made

" I love you, am in love with all the best parts of you, want to know and understand and love all the rest. It isn’t romantic. It isn’t the way that everyone suspects." and then, I fell in love anyway

**Author's Note:**

> turns out im the sappy one. thanks for reading.


End file.
